Great Leap Forward

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. An economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1961 which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform China from a primarily agrarian economy by peasant farmers into a modern communist society through the agriculturalization and industrialization

Etymologies

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Examples

Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China's ruling party has pulled off an extraordinary Houdini act, shaking off the horrors of Mao-made catastrophe -- including the death by starvation of 35 to 40 million people in the so-called Great Leap Forward -- and disentangling itself from the ideological chains that doomed the Soviet communists.

Some of the reports were a throwback to more bitter times, during the disastrous agricultural collectivization known as the Great Leap Forward, when nearly the entire population was starved and many survived on leaves, wild vegetables, and half-rotting foodstuffs.

There has been a remarkable general expansion of longevity, and despite the temporary setback during the terrible famines of 1958 “ 1961 (following the disastrous failure of the so-called Great Leap Forward), the Chinese life expectancy at birth increased from the low forties around 1950 to the high sixties by the time the economic reforms were introduced in 1979.

Maxwell Hearn, who heads the Met's department of Asian art and curated this installation, believes that "Fu must have had ambivalent feelings vis à vis Communism and Mao" given the hardship caused by the Great Leap Forward and the capriciousness of censorship.